Frieda

An exciting project! With the collaboration of a tattoo artist that made the sketch and the wood sculptor Sabine Sapok that carved the top wood, we build a custom metal guitar for a kung fu master/skydiving teacher/advertising character/Hamburg original.

At the beginning, there was the sketch by the tattooist. For the shape we decided to take a simple but modern double cut that give access to the highest frets. The combination of meranti and maple wood for neck and body is great for a good attack and sustain so we took it for this guitar. The top wood is plain maple which made it easy for the sculptor to carve. The inlays are the customer’s kung fu school’s logo at the frets 3, 5 and 7 and the others are black pearl dots in different sizes.

The customer wanted a Floyd Rose and a very wide nut for his big hands. The standard locking nuts are quite small so we had to take single lock nuts behind a zero fret, that are intended for headless guitars but work great here. The active EMG 89 pickups are both humbucker and singlecoil (which sounds different to a splitted humbucker) in one enclosure and are switched by a 5-way-blade switch for flexible sounds. The EMG Afterburner boosts the signal if neccessary.